Music Video: Black Eyed Peas - "Just Can't Get Enough"

Gone But Not Forgotten: Nate Dogg's 15 Greatest Music Appearances

As the tragic, unsettling news of Nate Dogg's death settles, VIBE looks back at a few of the West Coast crooner's most epic music moments. R.I.P. Nathaniel Dwayne Hale

Katy Perry's mother writes book

Katy Perry's preacher mother, Mary Perry Hudson, is shopping a book about how her pop-star daughter has impacted her Christian ministry, and admits that while she's proud of Katy, she "disagrees with a lot of choices she makes in her career."

Hudson shopped the proposal, seen by Page Six, to New York's literary agents hoping to land a publishing deal. "This memoir is her story, in her own words. Mary and Keith Hudson have been Christian Evangelists long before the world every heard of Katy Perry," the proposal begins.

Following her debut single, "Ur So Gay," the raunchy singer's career took off with her smash hit "I Kissed a Girl." She flaunted bust-bearing outfits and sexy bad-boy husband Russell Brand while comparing her upbringing to "Jesus Camp" and recalling speaking in tongues and channeling messages from God. Perry admitted kissing girls before marrying confessed sex-addict Brand.

Perry told Rolling Stone last year, "Speaking in tongues is as normal to me as 'Pass the salt' . . . It's a secret, direct prayer language to God. My dad speaks in tongues and my mom interprets it . . . I wasn't ever able to say I was lucky because my mother would rather us say that we were blessed. Deviled eggs were called 'angeled' eggs."

Her mother's proposal states: "Amid a torrent of negative reports from tabloid magazines and entertainment shows, Mary Hudson wants to tell 'her story' and dispel a lot of rumors. Katy's success has impacted her ministry in both negative and positive ways.

"She loves her daughter very much and is very proud of her accomplishments, but disagrees with a lot of choices she makes in her career. This memoir is to set the record straight. It is not Christian proselytizing or a Katy Perry tell-all. It is the story of Mary Perry Hudson."

Co-writer T.L. Gray told us, "We currently have interest from a couple of different agencies, but have not signed with anyone . . . Mary also just completed a Christian book called 'Joyful Mother' that will be released soon from Destiny Image . . . we've been playing around with a few different titles." A rep for Perry didn't get back to us.

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Rolling Stone reviews Rebecca Black's "Friday"

Rebecca Black's "Friday," a song and music video produced by the Los Angeles company Ark Music Factory, has gone viral over the past few days, bubbling up from Tumblr and Twitter to become one of 2011's fastest-growing memes. The clip has already been parodied, covered and remixed many times over, and will likely inspire further variations as it spreads throughout internet communities and pop culture. The fascination with the video mainly comes down to its subpar production values, grating hooks and extraordinarily stupid lyrics. (This is a song that makes a point of explaining the sequence of days in the week.)

But there's something else going on here, something that makes "Friday" uniquely compelling. After all, there's no shortage of insipid failed pop music out there, and Ark Music Factory is responsible for many other music videos by young unknowns that are just as cringe-inducing, if not much worse. When you see this video, you immediately notice everything that it does "wrong," but it actually gets a lot of things about pop music right, if just by accident.

For one thing, Black's voice is totally bizarre. It's not just the processing on her vocals – she has a peculiar tonality that inadvertently highlights the absurdity of boilerplate pop lyrics that may not seem as ridiculous if, say, Katy Perry was singing instead. When she sings the "Friday, Friday" hook or the "fun fun fun fun" refrain, she sounds unlike anything else in pop music. Perhaps the closest comparison is Laraine Newman in Saturday Night Live's Coneheads sketches – pinched and stilted, like an alien attempting to pass an average American girl. Obviously, this isn't the most pleasant sound in the world, but Black comes out sounding like a distinct singer with an alluring sort of anti-charisma.

With a voice as strange as this, Black probably doesn't belong in the world's most generic modern pop song, but here she is. "Friday" is exactly what you expect from teen-oriented pop in 2011, from the sing-song melodies on down to a guest spot from an anonymous rapper who's only tangentially related to the rest of the song. If the video was intended to be a parody of teen pop convention, it would be on par with some of the best SNL Digital Shorts by Lonely Island.

And thus Black and Ark Music Factory have made a video that forces its audience to reckon with a particular formula for pop music. It's not as if any of this was ever actually cool, but suddenly it seems as if any legit pop singer goes anywhere near the vibe of "Friday," it will just seem like a joke.

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